Why wouldn't they just use a portable reader like food delivery guys have been for over a decade? I mean, in Canada if you order food the driver shows up with a machine you insert your card and enter your pin. These machines do all communication by 3G. You see food trucks and coffee shops with these too. Isn't that the norm in the US?

Portable chip based card readers have been around longer than Square. Hell, I remember using them (pre-chip of course) since around 2000ish. And today they are just ubiquitous. They are straightforward and user-friendly for the user and today the Banks almost give them aways with your merchant account. I'm still trying to understand what problem Square is trying to solve -- other than wanting to use your iPhone for everything. I just don't see a viable business with them.

That's not the norm, as of this year the chips are not commonplace in US-issued cards.

What you have is an imprint machine, where the merchant sticks your card over a paper with a carbon copy, slides over the top to make an imprint, then hands the piece of paper back to you for signature, then rips out the top page for himself while handing you the carbon copy one.

As you can imagine, this does not go well in food truck environment, where the mode of operation at crunch time might be "process as many customers per minute as you can".

Wow. That's just crazy! I haven't seen one of those imprint machines in 15 years. I thought they were completely dead. Even before the Chip cards, it was normal to have portable terminals that you would just swipe, enter your tip, and it prints the receipt that you signed.

You can't go on adoption alone. You have to look at their balance sheet, and the whole point of the article is that their balance sheet and future sustainability is reportedly not so hot.

Although to be fair it does end on a non-fatalist note that leadership may be able to tweak the business into something less grandiose and more oriented towards grinding out a profit on a better-than-average commodity product.

Unfortunately, in the market of transaction processing, that's not an indicator of success. Transaction volume is. It is the only metric of success.

Not all of them are using Square. There a lots of merchant companies that offer card swipe phone adapters, including PayPal and Quicken.

I wonder how much would cost to have the actual card reader that's seen in shops around

Oh by the way, Square's market is limited. The USA still uses primarily the unsafe magnetic stripe for payments, and even Canada is phasing out its use (in Interac at least)

This is a good point. Surely Square have a plan for when America finally joins the present decade and adopts EMV/Chip and PIN? Or are they hoping to bootstrap pure mobile payments as an alternative? I don't see a competitive advantage in the latter scenario when PayPal already have a system with photo verification rolling out here in the UK.

Square's expansion in Canada last year doesn't appear to have gone anywhere meaningful. It's not just Interac; all cards are now Chip based. Credit Cards still also have the swipe but it's mainly used for cross-boarder shopping. It's been years since I've seen a card swiped in Canada that wasn't from an American tourist. Finally, Interac debit cards dominate the Canadian POS scene and the are Chip only and so won't work with Square any time soon.

If Square can't even meaningfully make inroads into Canada, I highly doubt they will be able to make inroads into anywhere else. But, we'll see...

chip is becoming more popular in the us now too

Mandatory as of October 2015 next year actually.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomgroenfeldt/2014/01/28/america...

Not mandatory, just (barely) incentivized starting in 2015. You'll see non-EMV cards and terminals around for probably another decade.

This is highly doubtful. The fact that merchants take on all fraud risk from a fake card present transaction is very high incentive. I have friends in Canada that own retail stores and they said that fraud has dropped to almost zero because of EMV. There are ways to scam it, by pretending that the chip doesn't work and have the cashier swipe it, but if the cashier swipes it instead of using the pin, they get in trouble because the merchant loses money.

So I bet you'll see very quick adoption, within a couple of years max.

Big box stores are already moving towards it, with Target (surprise! surprise!) leading the way. Mom-and-Pop shops will probably not be happy about replacement costs, but they're apparently a diminishing market force anyways.

Experience from other places that switched to EMV shows that this incentive is large enough to have a rather quick adoption. Yes, there are some niches where non-EMV terminals stick around - those that are low-volume and feel immune to fraud; but all common stores seem to switch quickly as otherwise all fraudsters focus on those who haven't switched yet, and low-margin business can't afford losing that money.